Mike Whaley: Visions of Rico, 'Blue Moon' and 'Mudcat'

Monday

Oct 8, 2012 at 3:15 AMOct 8, 2012 at 5:33 AM

If you grew up playing or watching baseball, chances are you collected baseball or bubblegum cards. It was a rite of passage.Over 40 years later, the smell of the bubblegum still lingers. Also the memory of the anticipation; the hasty removal of the coated paper wrapping, the bubblegum stick on top and the first card dusted with the gum's thin white sugar residue.Honestly, the bubblegum didn't taste that good. It was rectangular and easily snapped in two (or three or four) and the flavor lasted about as long as it took Lou Brock to dash from home to first base.But it grew on you and it stayed with you.Because you knew that underneath it were the treasures of baseball. Maybe a superstar like Yaz, Clemente or Mays, and most certainly a lovable everyday toiler like Manny Mota, Cesar Tovar, Eddie Brinkman, Paul Casanova or Jose Cardenal. Or maybe a colorful favorite: Rusty Staub, “Le Grande Orange”; Jim “Mudcat” Grant or John “Blue Moon” Odom.Of course, if you got one of the Red Sox, you hit the mother lode.At the time, when my brothers and I collected cards in the late 1960s to early 1970s, Topps was the card company. My brother, Chris, was convinced that Topps played a regional sleight of hand, packaging fewer Sox cards in the New England region, forcing you to buy more packs in hopes of finding that rare Sox player. More often than not, it turned out to be a lesser Sox, OMG, Joe Lahoud or Bob Bolin or Vicente Romo.We, of course, didn't care. A Red Sox was a Red Sox.The Impossible Dream summer of 1967 entranced many of us, and certainly helped to initiate my love of baseball. By 1968, card collecting was in full swing. Not for their future worth, but for the present, the love of the game, the stats, the trivia, the thrill of baseball. Heck, even the gum.We found enjoyment in all players, pored over their numbers. Chris invented a game with a homemade ballpark (books serving as fences and, indeed, enclosures for the entire park) and a marble as the baseball. Players like light-hitting Johnny Briggs and Bobby Wine were the batting stars.My first baseball hero also emerged: Rico Petrocelli.I still have his 1968 Red Sox card from that first year that we fell head over heels in love with baseball.It has survived 44 years of mishandling, misplacement and is the worse for wear. At some point, Rico's dog-eared corners were removed. The surface is worn, and the back is a mess from when he was glued to the pages of a scrapbook for a decade or two. Today he is protected in a plastic sleeve.But Rico was my hero. I can still rattle off his main numbers from his all-star seasons with the Sox in 1967 and 1969. He hit .259 in '67 with 17 homers and 66 RBIs. In '69, his greatest season, he set an American League record for homers by a shortstop with 40, batted .297 and drove in 97 runs.Of course, Rico, along with Yaz, bridged two of my earliest and best baseball memories: the '67 and '75 World Series.I also have a 1972 card of Roberto Clemente, which I admit is in better shape — even then I was fully aware of his greatness — albeit suffering from the same scrapbook malady.We memorized the stats, traded the cards, played with them. We mimicked the batting stances and pitching motions of the better players during backyard Wiffle ball games: Joe Morgan's chicken wing, Yaz and his singular elbow-way-up stance, Juan Marichal's high kick, and, of course, Luis Tiant's incomparable whirling, dipping, look-at the-sky delivery.Eventually, the cards even became part of our Christmas tradition. Players like the immortal John Lowenstein and Kurt Bevacqua had a hole punched center top and a pipe cleaner affixed through the hole, and then they were hung as ornaments on the Christmas tree.At some point in the early 1970s, we also inherited from an older cousin his cards from the mid 1950s. There were stars like Ted Williams, Sandy Koufax, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays. We played with them as hard as we did with our regular cards. There were, of course, other lesser players, also fondly remembered: Billy Consolo, Bob Grim, Rip Repulski, Ray Narleski, Bob Friend, Bob Nieman, Bobby Avila, Murray Dickson, Dale Long …Our interest in baseball cards waned by the mid '70s. All our cards gradually disappeared: traded away, gifted, lost or sold. There's some regret, but not at money lost. Along with Rico and Roberto, I still have three of the older cards, all scrapbook victims: Don Larsen (who threw the only World Series perfect game in 1956 for the Yankees), Ed Lopat (five-time World Series winner with Yankees) and two-time A.L. batting champ Ferris Fain.The cards these days do not have the style or grace of the older cards. They are too flashy and glitzy for my taste, some embossed with gold or silver, using more action shots rather than those classic corny poses (a right-handed Bob Uecker smiling while batting left-handed). Hey, it's an old school thing.I recently started collecting cards again, mostly of the era of my youth (mid 1960s to mid 1970s). I buy, for the most part, 25 to 50 cent cards, but occasionally I'll spring more for, say, a Willie Mays or Hank Aaron or Bob Gibson. It's like running into old friends: Pudge, Rooster, Yaz, Tony C., Hawk, Boomer and, of course, Rico.Baseball cards have also made a Christmas comeback in my household. Even Lowenstein and Bevacqua have been plucked from obscurity to take their rightful places on the yuletide bench, er, branch.Sometimes I can even smell the bubblegum.Mike Whaley is the sports editor for Foster's Daily Democrat and the Rochester Times. He can be reached at mwhaley@fosters.com.